"The Church in the Southern Black Community" collects autobiographies, biographies, church documents, sermons, histories, encyclopedias, and other published materials. These texts present a collected history of the way Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life. Coverage begins with white churches' conversion efforts, especially in the post-Revolutionary period, and depicts the tensions and contradictions between the egalitarian potential of evangelical Christianity and the realities of slavery. It focuses, through slave narratives and observations by other African American authors, on how the black community adapted evangelical Christianity, making it a metaphor for freedom, community, and personal survival. Context The North American Slave Narratives collection at the University of North Carolina contains 344 items and is the most extensive collection of such documents in the world. The physical collection was digitized and transcribed by students and library employees. This means that the text is far more reliable than uncorrected OCR output which is common in digitized archives. More information about the collection and access to individual page images can be be found here: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh The plain text files have been optimized for use in Voyant and can also be used in text mining projects such as topic modeling, sentiment analysis and natural language processing. Please note that the full text contains paratextual elements such as title pages and appendices which will be included in any word counts you perform. You may wish to delete these in order to focus your analysis on just the narratives. The .csv file acts as a table of contents for the collection and includes Title, Author, Publication Date a url pointing to the digitized version of the text and a unique url pointing to a version of the text in plain text (this is particularly useful for use with Voyant: http://voyant-tools.org/). Copyright Statement and Acknowledgements With the exception of "Fields's Observation: The Slave Narrative of a Nineteenth-Century Virginian," which has no known rights, the texts, encoding, and metadata available in Open DocSouth are made available for use under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Users are free to copy, share, adapt, and re-publish any of the content in Open DocSouth as long as they credit the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for making this material available. If you make use of this data, considering letting the holder of the original collection know how you are using the data and if you have any suggestions for making it even more useful. Send any feedback to wilsonlibrary@unc.edu. About the DocSouth Data Project Doc South Data provides access to some of the Documenting The American South collections in formats that work well with common text mining and data analysis tools. Documenting the American South is one of the longest running digital publishing initiatives at the University of North Carolina. It was designed to give researchers digital access to some of the library’s unique collections in the form of high quality page scans as well as structured, corrected and machine readable text. Doc South Data is an extension of this original goal and has been designed for researchers who want to use emerging technology to look for patterns across entire texts or compare patterns found in multiple texts. We have made it easy to use tools such as Voyant (http://voyant-tools.org/) to conduct simple word counts and frequency visualizations (such as word clouds) or to use other tools to perform more complex processes such as topic modeling, named-entity recognition or sentiment analysis.